


the future and once

by schweet_heart



Series: Merlin Fic [3]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Bittersweet Ending, Canonical Character Death, Immortal Merlin, M/M, Merlin lives backwards, remix eligible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-21
Updated: 2014-09-21
Packaged: 2018-02-18 04:57:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2336090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schweet_heart/pseuds/schweet_heart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin is watching the world unmake itself, one confusing day at a time. He's never quite sure if being an almost-immortal wizard who lives backwards through time is really all that it's cracked up to be, but at least, at the end of everything, there's Arthur.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the future and once

**I.**

 

 

The first time Merlin meets Arthur is when the man comes back to life in his arms. He’s aware that this is important, this meeting, because he has known about the absence of Arthur for a long time — for centuries, even. He has seen how the world itself folds up in grief without him, has followed his echoes back to this, his final resting place. What he doesn’t expect, even knowing all that he does, is for Arthur to know _him_. 

 

“Thank you,” the king says, and Merlin wants, as he has not wanted in all his long life, to know what he has done to make this man look at him with so much trust in his eyes.

 

“For what?” he asks. 

 

“For everything you are about to do.”

 

 

-+-

 

 

The next day, Arthur seems better, his face having not yet gained the bluish pallor of approaching death. He leans against a tree while Merlin re-bandages his wound, probing the damaged flesh and trying futilely to seal the ragged edges with his magic.

 

“You tried that yesterday,” Arthur tells him. “I’m not sure how this living backwards thing works exactly, but you have to know how this story ends.”

 

“I just have to keep trying,” Merlin says, willing himself to sound certain. Even now, his first instinct is still to save a life, to preserve what hope he can, but putting his anxiety down to general philanthropy would be disingenuous; there is something about this man that makes him care, though Merlin has yet to know why. 

 

Arthur’s eyes are on him, blue and too-knowing, resigned.

 

“You’re not exactly filling me with confidence, old friend,” he says, and Merlin doesn’t reply.

 

 

-+-

 

 

They talk, later, about other things, things whose significance Merlin is only now coming to understand.

 

“When I’m gone,” Arthur says. “What happens to Camelot? To Guinevere?” 

 

Merlin doesn’t know what to tell him. “She grieves, sire. We all grieve.”

 

“But the kingdom?”

 

He hesitates, then tells him what he knows to be true.

 

“Camelot isn’t the same without you.” _There has been something missing all my life, without you._

 

Arthur doesn’t respond for a time, allowing Merlin the respite of building up the fire before he says, “So it was all for nothing, then.”

 

“No, sire,” Merlin says firmly. “It wasn’t.”

 

 

-+-

 

 

The second time Merlin tries, yet again, to heal the man fate has placed in his charge, Arthur says: “When you first told me about your magic, I was angry. I thought you should have told me when we first met — that you’d been lying to me all these years.”

 

His gaze rests thoughtfully on Merlin’s hands where they are spread flat against his abdomen, pointlessly trying to force the magic into his skin. It should work, he thinks; it’s only an ordinary wound, after all, deep but not unfixable — not to him. If it’s already over, why is it he can’t help trying?

 

“But you did tell me, didn’t you?” Arthur says, like he’s just figuring it out, in a tone that doesn’t really require an answer. “I just didn’t realise, because for me it was the ending, not the beginning.”

 

“When did I tell you?” Merlin asks.

 

“A few days ago. Although I think maybe I always knew, in a way.”

 

There is so little time. Merlin, who has lived for centuries, who has already seen kingdoms turn to dust and legends fade into obscurity, finds himself inexplicably moved by the realisation that time, for him, is in one sense as short as for any other man, though it runs in the opposite direction. 

 

 

-+-

 

 

The king attempts to be gentle with him at first, while he still understands, distracting himself from the pain of his wound by engaging Merlin in conversation. He tells Merlin things that Merlin wonders if he has ever told another soul — things like how much he used to miss his mother, and how certain he had been that his father hated him, all those years ago. He tells Merlin nothing about their time together, although at times he seems almost to struggle with something, as if trying to decide whether now is the right moment to confess some other, larger secret. He never does.

 

Too soon, however, the king grows sullen and then silent, and Merlin knows the time for confidences is coming to a close. 

 

“It will be all right,” he says, because he honestly wishes it to be true. “I’ll find a way to save you, Arthur. I promise.”

 

Arthur turns his face away.

 

 

-+-

 

 

“What’s it like?” he asks, when Merlin finally tells him; when Arthur finally believes him. “Living everything backwards?”

 

Merlin has to think about it for a moment. 

 

“Confusing,” he says.

 

 

 

 

**II.**

 

 

Merlin has very little faith in calendars, since they seem to him to be always telling things in the wrong order, counting down to what has already happened, but as time moves on in its inexorable fashion he finds himself marking mentally each unit of distance that takes them further away from the day they met, for the first and the last time. It is strange to him that they should be revealed to each other only in that brief handful of days, and he wonders if Arthur too found the experience unbearably truncated, like a pair of parabolas that meet once and then glance away, never to return. He deeply regrets not being able to ask him. 

 

The Arthur that he knows is a great king, if a troubled one. It soon becomes obvious that the tranquility Merlin had observed in their first encounter by the lake was the product of his injury and not at all characteristic — Arthur in his prime is all energy and light, an agitation of thought and motion. He treats Merlin with the familiar ease that comes with years of faithful service, and after he gets over the shock of waking up to find himself manservant to the _king_ , of all things, there is a kind of justice in it, a balancing of things. After all, he is a young man now, in body if not in mind. People seldom expect to seek counsel from the young.

 

“Is there something bothering you, Merlin?” Arthur asks him once, near the beginning, on the shore’s-edge of a winter’s evening when the dark is lapping in. Merlin is undressing him in front of the fire, intent on his work, and looks up in surprise when Arthur addresses him so directly.

 

“No, my lord,” he says, although, under the circumstances, he’s not altogether certain that there isn’t. “Why do you ask?”

 

“Well, for one thing — “ a brief pause as the shirt comes off  “ — you’re much more formal than you used to be. I’d like to think I’ve finally taught you manners, except I decided a long time ago that such a thing wasn’t humanly possible. And for another, you’re even worse at your job than you were when you started. So the only conclusion I can come to is that you’re mad at me about something.”

 

“Do I often get angry with you, sire?” Merlin asks, curious. Arthur gives him a strange look.

 

“Yes?” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “You’re like a bloody fishwife, with all your harping on.” He looks at Merlin through his lashes, as if assessing whether he is insulted. “It’s quite unpleasant.”

 

“Then I should think you’d be happy that I’ve stopped.”

 

Arthur laughs. “You’d think so. And yet, instead I find myself waiting for the other boot to fall.”

 

Merlin looks up at him, the coppery gold of the firelight in his hair and on the curve of his cheek, and tells him as much of the truth as he can. “It’s only that — in some ways, I feel as if we’re still strangers.”

 

All mirth in Arthur’s expression vanishes, and his eyes turn dark; intent. 

 

“Strange,” he says softly. “Sometimes so do I.”

 

 

-+-

 

 

Time marches backwards. Merlin learns Camelot the way he might an oft-used spell, sinking into the familiar syllables, learning the way it feels in his mouth and on his tongue. It helps that he has friends there already, Gaius and Elyan and Percival and Gwaine, all of whom welcome him into the fold as if he belongs there, as if he’s always known them. Guinevere, whom he has not yet known as anything other than a newly widowed queen, is a revelation. Seeing her now, vibrant and joyful as his queen was not, Merlin thinks that death saps not only life but colour from the living; when Arthur was dying, he had turned pale and translucent like the thin leaf at the end of an ancient book, and when Arthur had died, Guinevere lost all her brightness, and walked in black even when she dressed in the most brilliant red.

 

Morgana he learns about as he once did Arthur, more through her absence than her presence. She is a lingering shadow at the edge of his vision, an impending threat, and he’s never quite sure if she is receding or advancing. He hears about her mostly in fragments: how Arthur misses her, how Gwen still remembers her fondly, how time and again she tries to take Camelot and fails. All of this seems strange to him, until one day Arthur lets slip that she was his sister in all but name, and Merlin murmurs quietly to himself, “Heav’n hath no rage like love to hatred turn’d, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

 

"What was that, Merlin?” Arthur asks him, looking up from the speech he is preparing at his desk. “That was quite good. Where did you hear it?”

 

“I’m afraid I don’t remember, sire,” Merlin says, because William Congreve hasn’t even been born yet, and busies himself with mending Arthur’s tunic so he doesn’t have to look at him. Sometimes the guilt is so strong that he thinks he might drown in it, and other times he’s not sure it’s guilt that makes him want as he does to reach out to Arthur and keep him safe, to fold him up into his magic and lock him away where no one can touch him, not even his sister. Not even his wife.

 

-+-

 

One of the first times they face each other, not long after the final battle, Morgana says to him, the Seer to the Man Who Lives Backwards, for a moment the only two who understand: “You will be his downfall.”

 

“Yes,” Merlin says. “As I will be yours. I am everyone’s downfall, it seems.”

 

Her expression doesn’t falter; it is crazed, manic. He wants to hate her, except she is right, and all of this is his fault, so all he can feel is pity and more than a little sorrow. 

 

“There is a story, Emrys,” Morgana says, “Of a woman who was so beautiful she caused two kingdoms to go to war, to determine which would keep her. Thousands of men died, and all for love.”

 

“Love of beauty, or love of power?” Merlin asks, unmoved.

 

She smiles. 

 

“Power is beauty, and beauty, power,” she says. “Do you think they follow him because he is beautiful? Do you think they follow me because I have power?”

 

Merlin thinks of Arthur in the firelight, and his throat aches. “They follow him because he is the Once and Future King.”

 

“Maybe. But somehow I doubt that is the source of your allegiance.”

 

“I follow him by choice,” Merlin says. “Arthur is a good man.” 

 

Morgana only laughs at him, and shakes a finger under his nose the way a mother might chastise a naughty child.

 

“You’re a terrible liar, old man,” she says.

 

 

-+-

 

 

The thing about Arthur is that he _is_ a good man, perhaps a great one. He is also impatient, arrogant and sometimes petulant, difficult to rouse in the mornings and prone to throwing things at insubordinate manservants. None of these is why Merlin falls in love with him. 

 

Later, years later, when Morgana comes back to the castle, her betrayal raw and mending and then suddenly undone, Merlin thinks about the small, private smile Arthur gives him sometimes when he is amused or happy; the gentleness of his hands on Merlin’s shoulders or back. He still treats Merlin like he’s an idiot, orders him around with peremptory disregard — occasionally, he’s even borderline cruel. From time to time for no reason that Merlin can discern, he will catch the prince staring at him with a distant expression that is so remote as to be unreadable, and usually on those days he is particularly hard to bear, demanding and imperious, his remarks cutting and his shoves less than playful. Merlin tells himself he could never love a man who would act like this, could never love a man who would be such an ass.

 

Merlin is a terrible liar, especially to himself. 

 

 

 

 

**III.**

 

 

It seems inevitable that someday Merlin will slip up and reveal himself, but in the end it is Arthur who makes the first move; Arthur who draws him aside with a gentle touch on his wrist and presses against him with his body and covers Merlin’s lips with his own. Merlin has known about his own feelings for a while but Arthur’s he has never suspected; the king — he still thinks of him in that way — has always been sweet but circumspect, lately even downright reticent, and Merlin has made himself believe it is wishful thinking; an impossibility.

 

And yet, now, there is this: Arthur’s hands on his face, sword-callus against stubble, light and demanding all at once, and Merlin’s hands in his hair, grasping and greedy, dragging him closer against all better judgment. 

 

Because he is only human he allows himself this one indulgence, knowing that this is another point in their lives where first and last must intersect. He lets Arthur push him up against the stone and strip him bare with a kiss; lets his prince unmake him layer by layer, thinking _if I have to lose him, at least let me have this_ ; and feels his magic respond, cradling Arthur close and precious, scrambling with all his senses to hold onto what he already knows he’s already lost. 

 

Arthur, for his part, says nothing about what must seem to him to be Merlin’s unaccountable possessiveness — perhaps he merely takes it for his due. He gives back as good as he gets, pressing his mouth to Merlin’s skin and murmuring endearments that Merlin only half believes, can’t let himself believe if he’s to survive this. Already he is coming apart under Arthur’s hands, shaking with the strength of it, his knees gone weak and helpless as the prince divests him of his clothing along with his reservations and they tumble onto the bed together, naked in every sense of the word.

 

“I love you,” Arthur breathes into his ear, and Merlin wants to say it back, he does, but the words are lodged in his throat so that all he can do is try to show it instead, with every urgent kiss and reverent touch. Arthur’s skin is warm beneath his hands, soft and alive, and Merlin does his best not to think about the only other time he held Arthur in his arms like this, lost and bewildered and full of a grief he didn’t understand. _I love you_ , he says with his fingertips, tracing the contours of Arthur’s face and the hard line of his cock where it leaks against his belly. _I love you_ , he says with his hips, rocking in sync with Arthur’s increasingly frantic thrusts, the prince’s fingers digging into Merlin’s waist. _I love you_ , he says, one final time, as his own orgasm rips through him and he buries his face in Arthur’s neck to muffle the sound. He doesn’t realise that he’s crying until the prince reaches out to brush at his cheeks with one hand, looking confused and slightly sheepish.

 

“Merlin?”

 

“I’m fine,” Merlin says. “Just a little — overwhelmed.”

 

Arthur huffs. “You’re such a girl,” he murmurs, kissing Merlin’s sweaty forehead, and Merlin can’t help but laugh.

 

“Yes, sire,” he agrees, burrowing down into the crook of Arthur’s arm. “And you’re a royal prat.”

  
Arthur pinches him, but doesn’t reply, and Merlin falls asleep on the wish that he could wake up, for once, in the future, and make it all change. That he could wake up in a world where he got to keep this forever. And Merlin thinks, _one day I will look at you and you will have no idea who I am. And it will break my heart._

 

 

-+-

 

 

“We can’t do this again,” he says later, when Arthur is getting dressed in preparation for dinner. The prince stops moving and turns slowly to face him, head erect and wary, as if he’s not sure he’s heard right. “We can’t,” Merlin repeats, hoping against hope that Arthur will let it stand. “It’s not our destiny.”

 

“What if I don’t care about destiny?”

 

“Destiny doesn’t care about you either,” Merlin tells him bluntly, which is true as far as it goes. “So it doesn’t make any difference how you feel. Arthur, you have to understand — ”

 

“I don’t have to do anything,” Arthur says, his eyes narrowing dangerously. He looks angry and wrong-footed, and Merlin curses himself as a weakling and a fool for letting things go this far. “Tell me, Merlin, did I force you? Did I do anything at any time you didn’t want?”

 

“No! Arthur, no — that’s not what this is about!”

 

“What, then?” And now there’s a bitter twist to his mouth, like he’s bracing himself for a long-anticipated betrayal. “Are you in love with someone else? Gwen, perhaps? Or did you think this was simply another part of your duties, and now you’ve decided you don’t want to serve me after all?”

 

“Arthur, please.” Merlin chokes on his own voice. “I have served you from the moment I last drew breath and will serve you until the day I’m born. This has nothing to do with whether or not I love you.” 

 

“Get out,” is all Arthur says, and Merlin goes, miserable, realising that he has at last discovered the source of the prince’s recent distemper. Somehow, the revelation brings little comfort. Arthur will get over this, and forgive him; he will fall in love with Gwen and get married and be a brilliant, golden king, and Merlin will indeed serve him, as he was meant to. Arthur will eventually move on.

 

It’s Merlin who has to live with the fact that all of this hasn’t happened yet.

 

 

-+-

 

 

There are days when Merlin thinks he should just sit Arthur down and tell him the truth. All it would take is one minuscule demonstration of power, one mention of what he is and all that he’s seen, and Arthur’s death might be averted. They could be together. Sometimes, when he’s at his weakest, whenever he remembers how it had felt to unravel in Arthur’s arms and know that he was safe, and above all, loved, he even opens his mouth to do it - to say, “Arthur, I’m a warlock,” or “Arthur, I watched you die once and I want to make it so that never happened.” 

 

There are other days, however, when Merlin knows that living in reverse is, in some sense, a kindness. He has seen who Arthur is and what he will become, and lived through his ultimate fate without flinching because at the time Arthur meant little to him; was the name of a legend and a story, not a friend. If he had to live it all the way most people did, with each moment unexpected and strange, it would hurt far worse than it does now, to have all those years of friendship and love behind him never to return. At least this way, when he and Arthur ultimately part ways he will know the prince is out there somewhere, alive and flourishing, even if he can never see him again.

 

“How long have I been here, would you say?” he asks Gwen once, when she’s back to being a handmaiden and her eyes are much less haunted. “I’m losing track.”

 

She smiles at him. “About two years now, I expect,” she says. “Why, is it important?”

 

There is so little time. That’s the crux of it. Merlin laughs it off and takes the basket of laundry from Gwen’s hands to distract them both, but the awareness of it itches, the way Arthur’s presence sometimes gets under his skin and torments him with what was and what can never be. Arthur is intoxicating: he blazes like a brand so bright that Merlin falls asleep at night with an imprint of him on his eyelids, and the more Merlin struggles to cut himself free the more tangled up in him he becomes, until he wonders if it is possible for either of them ever to escape. 

 

“I just want him to see me for who I really am!” He tells Gaius once, angry and defeated and so very, very lonely. Those few, precious days where Arthur had looked at him and understood, even if Merlin didn’t, seem to stretch out into the distance like a receding wave, a half-remembered dream. “He never even says thank you!”

 

“One day, Merlin,” Gaius assures him. "One day he will know all you have done for him. You just have to keep trying.”

 

And Merlin does try — he keeps trying — to find a way to save Arthur, the way he promised him he would all those years ago, but the flow of time is such that very little can alter it: the details may be rearranged but the tune remains the same, and Merlin has the sense of flinging himself against a smooth expanse that is simultaneously unmoving and unmoved by his own petty struggles in the mortal realm. He does his best to forgive Morgana, to befriend her; he even goes out of his way to save Mordred, hoping against hope that letting the boy live will buy him time, a cure, even just a moment longer with Arthur alive. He can feel the skin of their destiny expand and contract around him, shifting to accommodate his every move without altering the single, unsustainable fact that is the focus of all his useless energies. The king must die. That is how it has always been.

 

And then he has only a year left; a few months; a week. All this power and yet the only thing he can do with it is snatch Arthur from the jaws of death again and again and know that it will all of it be in vain. And he understands now, understands that this is his reward and his punishment both. He was the one who wanted to unravel the thread of his own fate to see where it led; he was the one who interfered with forces beyond his control, with no conception of what they might choose to do to him in the process.

 

Sometimes, selfishly, he thinks that it would even almost be worth it, if only he could have known whether Arthur had truly loved him back.

 

 

 

 

**IV.**

 

 

He sees Arthur in the marketplace on that final morning, playing the lout as has become more common for him of late, unaware of the great king he will become. He looks impossibly young like this, the sunlight haloed on his messy hair, his body glowing with all the arrogance and confidence of a man who knows he will live forever.

 

“Do I know you?” he asks Merlin, who stares up at him with a smile that ends at the lids of his eyes and the corners of his mouth. There is no recognition in Arthur’s face. 

 

“I’m Merlin,” he says, for the first time; for the last time. He doesn’t get to say goodbye. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title inspired by the imaginary fic referred to in [Pairing: Pendragon/Merlin](http://merlinkinkmeme.livejournal.com/12537.html), which is a totally awesome, non-imaginary fic you all should read ASAP.


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